On last weeks Podcast Allyn spoke briefly about a new technology for platter based drives from Western Digital that allowed the reading head to have vastly increased seek times along with anti-disks to optimize the airflow that the reading head needs. We finally get to see it in action in the Western Digital 7200RPM 2TB Caviar Black and RE4 Green Power drives. Check out the cutting edge speeds in his full review, plus a warning

Introduction

Western Digital brings 7200RPM to two of their product lines in the form of 2TB models. These drives come backed with some exciting new technology that promises to increase performance beyond that of a simple spindle speed increase. In this review we will explore these new features and see their impact on real world performance.

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Today Western Digital announced two new models to their product lines. Both are 7200 RPM 2TB models. First is the 2TB Caviar Black, and second is the 2TB RE4. We previously reviewed the 2TB RE4-GP, a 5400 RPM model. The RE4 will be the server class version of the consumer-grade Caviar Black, and will incorporate the same enterp

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Allyn took his tall stack of SSDs on a series of benchmarks to see what effect the size of the drive has on performance. With various sizes of this new storage available, it is worth finding out if size can change the performance you see from your shiny new drive. Of course, that is not all that he tested. There are different controllers, flash memory types and a new feature we will see from Windows 7 called TRIM, which is to help repair the damage done to drives through heavy usage. Some SSD makers were content to use TRIM, others went and designed their own repair met